Spring Villanelle

Thanks to the Kellogg-Hubbard Library and Montpelier Alive for hosting my Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop today as part of PoemCity 2014. We had four participants: poet and poetry therapist Mary Rose Dougherty, Indiana transplant & writer John Fox, film instructor and Sestina master Rick Winston, and Veteran and Vermonter George Druin.

We had a lively discussion of the form, its history, and its contents, while also reading a few great poems by Sherman Alexie, Dylan Thomas, and Ursula K. Le Guin, to name a few.

Books about Villanells I recommended and used as a reference are Villanelles edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); and The Teachers & writers handbook of poetic forms, edited by Ron Padgett (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000).

Thanks to our poets who participated today, five new Villanelles have been birthed into the world (I wrote one, too).

Here I'll share with you my own villanelle I wrote this morning, and also here is the form to give you a sense of how to write your own:

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Spring Villanelle 
        by Samantha Kolber


It's been too long since we've seen the sun.
We stumble blind
as if out of the dark cave we've come.

Ready for laughing and fun,
warmth on our skin.
It's been too long since we've seen the sun.

Ready for fingers in dirt, planting a garden.
The ground not harsh, but kind
as if out of the dark cave seeds come

up, released from Hades. Not a son
but a daughter reunites.
It's been too long since she's seen the sun.

And as for mothers and fathers you only get one.
If your childhood's been unkind
it's out of the darkness you've come.

Winter breeds darkness, and spring the growing season.
Mom, dad, I'm really trying
to see the sun.
Out of your dark cave is where I've come from.

Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop with Samantha Kolber: a PoemCity Event

It's that time of year again: National Poetry Month! To celebrate, I have joined the PoemCity 2014 movement in Montpelier, Vermont.

Not only do I have a poem displayed in the window of Julio's restaurant on State Street...

....but I am also teaching a free Modern Villanelle Writing Workshop on Saturday, April 12. Here is the program description:

Come learn about villanelles, and write your own!

“The villanelle is one of the most fascinating and paradoxical of poetic forms, quirky and edgy…prone to moods of obsession and delight; structured through the marriage of repetition and surprise… No wonder it is currently enjoying such a powerful, post-modernist blossoming,” from Villanelles: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets. 

We’ll read aloud examples by poets such as Sherman Alexie and Sylvia Plath to get inspired; then we’ll get busy creating our own villanelles. All levels and ages of writers are welcome.

Hayes Room, Kellogg-Hubbard Library, 135 Main Street | 10 AM

Hope to see you there!

Walk Poem at Norwich University

for ENV 299, thank you

I wish I had sunglasses
on these short
annoying stairs.

I see Meg's dark eyes
much worse, the sun shines
and her smile still sparkles.

Looking up is fruitless.

The wind makes the leaves dance
and I wish they wouldn't
distract me so.

Stark shadow on the ground
is me getting out of my own way.

The bark eye of the tree
is underneath all things.

I smell asphalt on the wind.
I wish I didn't smell asphalt
but I wish I could smell wind.

Vibrant colors too clean and
bright and if we go down the stairs
I'll fall or not write as much.

The poet's obstacle course
can't make me jump the hoops
of all time.

Smelling green grass that grows fake
seeing gold chairs that feel hollow
why is it man-made life and
nature can both be so beautiful?

The newness mixed with the old
means nothing ever really dies.
It just changes shape.
Like this path that changes
from cement to dirt back to
cement again. Which one is the
true path? The way for poets?

I crashed my snowboard on this--
more stairs
steeply down
if I could wander down stairs,
across fields, in the sun toward a
glowing mountain of autumn leaves
forever, then I'd always know
I am alive. This heat gives life. This
bright green grass beneath my feet
that sparkles here and there with
leftover dew, tethers me to the ground.
Without ground, I'd float off
into an abstract sky.

Why call this fall when all we do is
stay? Stay here on the earth with
its crunchy leaves underfoot. Stay here
on an endless train track, forever
in both directions.

Moving into nature
say hello. Question.
Why this dirt?
Why that pile of hay?
Why that dead birch right there off
the path? Why do we veer off the path?

Listen! There's a sewer and underneath
a river flowing, I can hear it
shushing and lulling like a waterfall.

The crow caws, the sun makes me
glint and it hurts my eyes.

I run to catch up.
A gun shot far off in the hills.
I take a deep breath
a thousand breaths to make
this afternoon last forever.

Grab a hold of that light bulb
one flash and it's over.

I just found a poem I wrote in 2005 on an old hardrive, and I revised it into this new poem. What do you think?

-->

I want the weight of you,

not just your hand like a delicate shadow

on my belly;

Not just your open mouth on mine,

your scruff on my neck,  no

this won’t do.

I don’t want pieces of you.

I want the cool finger of vision,

your hands down my spine.

Our bodies wading shallow,

naked in a reflective pool. Two

puddles coming together,

the meniscus of our crescent

figures like droplets

returning from the waterfall.

On your lips I tell you this,

taste our stolen kiss.

You don’t hear me

through the rush.

© 2013 Samantha Kolber

A Poem for When I am Not Writing Poems

In fiction, I must ask:

What’s my character’s problem?

And not: Why aren’t I outside looking at the moon,

singing to her and pining for all things light and dark

to touch me in ways I can only dream of being touched?

In fiction I must write silence into my dialogue without saying

“Insert awkward silence here.”

Who knew?

Who knew that a life of nothing much would

lead me here, to a keyboard in the middle of the night,

to a man dancing parallel lines to my groovy hips?

And now I’m driving toward a one and only future,

one I can’t imagine but somehow have known,

at least I’ve known to write it down, to document.

I document for those who dare not speak, but what do I have to say for them?

I have no problem, hence

my character has no problem, unless you count

a general problem with the way the world works

as a central problem to solve. Why have we come this far

and not solved rape?

Why have we come this far to debate on

who can and cannot be married?

Why have we come this far?

It’s not very far at all, is it?

But we are far – far from the one, the one true point

I don’t even believe

we’ve really ever come from: that garden, that snake. Nope. Don’t buy it.

Everything will change, but how

have we evolved so far from divinity? So far from light and truth

and justice and peace for all? Who will you pledge your allegiance to

when the moon doth not shine? Who will you side with

when there is no light to see any sides? Because that light is gone

as far as I can tell,

and I’m not even a poet.

Anymore.

**

What it’s like to give up writing poems:

I’ve given up my camera,

I am unable to take pictures of your thoughts,

snap snap

I just took your heart

snap

an eyeball’s core with that image of

your brother’s bleeding wrists you had wanted to forget

snap

not even bandages cover up what my camera can capture.

I miss it. The darkness like my own private dark room,

the way my heart reached out to it

in negative phototropism.

The way my whole being would turn to it

in order to get the poem.

Poems come from dark and silent places,

and also light and fluffy ones.

But mostly dark.

Poets Know:

it’s not an attitude, it’s an attunement.

It’s not always about line breaks and enjamb

ments. Nor is it always about witnessing. Rhyming,

definitely not even close to being about rhyming.

But what? That question

says it all.

Fuck You, Depression

I.

I have stood where the wind

touches no one.

I have let her hollow cry

brush my ears.

And when she made me cry

from sheer bitterness

I went on pretending,

forced a plastered smile.

II.

I dress in black

and walk in snow,

rise tall like a shadow

or a ghost.

People say “Fuck

you, depression.”

I say nothing at all

and fall.

So tired and so awake

I recall whistling

to a dog in a sunny

park.

Was that my childhood

or just the one I wanted?

I lay with piles around

me—heaps and stacks I

never put away.

There’s just no room for it all.

I’m craving sunshine

big sky, curvy land,

vast ocean.

But I have snow, a grey sky,

city lights bounce off the

snow-covered streets.

Nothing much to anchor me

or help me feel.

III.

At home? Happy? Fulfilled? Who

ever really feels like that? I’m

hungry now, I always have

been. And this sucks, the

way I write now is always

looking for the good line, always

editing it down, even before I

write it to get the poem. I

can’t write the poem: it has

to write me. Oh I’ve forgotten

my tools. These are my tools.

Why am I filling my head with

fluff? Wasting my time with empty

entertainment? When I should be

carting my tools around

crafting stories and life from

the details I see.

I have always loved words.

Words are delicious.

Fucking depression. I will ninja

kick you back to hell.

Fuck you, depression. I will take a

Samurai sword and chop

your head off. Maybe even

borrow my dad’s machete. 

©2013 Samantha Kolber 

Clothes Shopping: Love/Hate Relationship with my Body

I just want to talk for a minute about women's bodies and shopping. Now, I have what I have always considered a normal body. I am not overweight, nor am I too skinny. I have some cellulose (perfectly normal) in my thighs, my calves are thick from sports, and I still have a waist (at my age and after having a kid). And I love my body--it grew and birthed a child, it has ran marathons and hiked up mountains, it has danced and laughed and repaired itself from illnesses and injuries--but I hate clothes shopping. The thing is, while trying on clothes and seeing how nothing fits even though I pick my size off the shelf, I start to loathe my body. Love body while not clothes shopping; hate body while clothes shopping. Tough equation.

In the dressing room while stuffing my all-of-a-sudden sausage legs into a size 10 pair of pants--damn "skinny" pants!--I start to feel fat. In a size 10. Scary double digits. I wonder, if sizes came in letters, A,B,C,D and so on, would I feel the same about my body? Or would I equate the letters with school grades and think I have failed if I wear a size F? Yet the numbers serve to tell me that the higher I go, the bigger I am. When in fact I am not big. I am just me. My body is perfectly sized exactly right just for me. So how is it nothing ever fits? Why aren't the clothing companies making clothes that actually fit my body? If one pair of pants is too small in the legs, they're too big in the waist. If another fits in the waist, they are two feet too long in the legs. Trying on endless pairs of pants, I find myself longing for the days where people made their own clothes, or had their own tailor.

And don't even get me started on those mirrors and those lights! While the clothing may make me feel fat, the lights and mirrors make me feel ugly! Blotchy, pale, discolored, wide, out of proportion--it's like a fun house mirror. If the companies do that on purpose to try and disorient us into making bad purchases, oh wait, it's working. I bought a royal blue blazer at the store where it looked awesome on me in their mirror, but when I got it home it looked like a Wal-Mart cashier  blazer! Sigh. Why do I even go shopping? Oh yeah, I usually don't shop at big box stores. Tonight was an exception. I think I'll stick to my local downtown stores who have signs on their regularly lighted mirrors that say "I am beautiful! I love my body." No more exceptions. No more cheap short-cuts to big box stores. Back to thrift stores and saving up for weeks to buy one item at a clothing boutique! You can't really win with clothes shopping, can you?

Constraints of a Box

Show me your fist
as if I didn’t know
you could hold it.

I never feel the blow
in my memory.
I’m too far out to row

through the possibilities.
Look at this beautiful
mess, the frailty

of your dutiful
voice: a perfect mess
you yell and yell.


©Samantha Kolber 2013

Seven Minutes for a Solstice Poem

There’s a lot of talk about “Let’s put the soul back in solstice” but how can we do that when we’re a society of zombies, walking around flat and attacking innocent children with semi-automatic weapons?

What soul?

A soul is not a compass, leading you in a moral direction.

A soul does not cover you like a shroud, or cloak your nakedness.

It does not stand there, solid as a tree. A soul is not solid.

How can you dare to put it into something as sure and solid as the solstice? We can count on the solstice; it comes twice a year.

It returns to us, unasked.

Once your soul leaves, will it return?

Sun- and soul-free time of winter: now is when we make our bad decisions—sleep too late, eat junk food, plot a massacre, mechanically go about our days.

Winter is when you’ll buy the things you do not need, say the things you don’t believe, break up with the ones you love because you’re just so glum and sure to find happiness with someone else, somewhere else.

So, you search for your soul.

You find that giving a hug to your son’s teacher at school brings a lump in your throat; being serenaded by a kilt-wearing banjo player in an art gallery brings tears to your eyes.

Oh yeah, you think: there you are, my soul.

                                     
                                           Samantha Kolber 12/21/12

Thanks for reading! And yes, I did write this in seven minutes. Part of my desire to be part of the Holiday Blog Tour was to force me to write, as I find myself too busy these days to engage with my passion. So, sitting down for seven minutes at a time works for me.

A BIG THANK YOU to Icess Fernandez Rojas for putting this Holiday Blog Tour 2012 together. 

Please be sure to read the next featured blogger in the tour tomorrow: Thelma T. Rayna at www.theliteraryself.blogspot.com. She has a long list of awards and published books (congrats, Thelma), but more importantly, she writes because it's good for her soul. And yours. Happy reading! And, happy holidays and blessings for the return of the sun.

Poet Tree Joins Holiday Blog Tour

Breaking News: I will be participating in the 2012 Holiday Blog Tour! Run by writer and Goddard College alumna Icess Fernandez Rojas of Writing to Insanity, this tour features an all-star cast of (mostly) women writers & artists in all genres: short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, painting, illustration, and more!

Mark your calendars to discover some amazing blog--I mean writing--talent (I will be writing a Solstice poem on the 21st):

Dec. 7 Lupe Mendez, The Poet Mendez
Dec. 8 Gwendolyn Jerris, Silence & Honeysuckle
Dec. 9 Natasha Oliver, 2 cents
Dec. 10 Regina Tingle, Unsolicited Certainties 
Dec. 11 Caridad Pineiro, Paranormal Romance Author Caridad Pineiro
Dec. 12 Teresa Carbajal Ravet, Sententia Vera
Dec. 13 Nathasha Alvarez, AudaciousLady
Dec. 14 Stephanie Dorman, How Many Frogs
Dec. 15 Karen La Beau, My Life on Canvas
Dec. 16 Annette Santos, The Monga Confesses
Dec. 17 Zoraida Cordova, Zoraida Writes
Dec. 18 Kristy Harding, Kristy Harding
Dec. 19 Nikki Kallio, Purple Houses
Dec. 20 Sujeiry Gonzalez, Love Sujeiry
Dec. 21 Samantha Kolber, Sam Poet 
Dec. 22 Thelma T. Reyna, The Literary Self
Dec. 23 Julia Amante, Julia Amante
Dec. 24 Icess Fernandez Rojas



I hope you follow along, and happy holidays!

All She Does is Write it Down and Say Thank You

                        for Annie Finch

What she hears

in the solitude of water

she remembers

into poems.

It Was Written Long Ago

It was written long ago: the wing’s beat

and the owl’s stare; the cool drink of morning

on the mountain. The verdant fields knew how

to sing long before the blue bunting rose

to the occasion, long before tourists

rose up from the pavement and declared this

land pure.

                     Vessels with technology might

be combing Lake Champlain for history

but we know there’s no fatidic tale the

lake will tell. It was written in our bones

only we don’t pay attention to that

story anymore. The ursine birth of

our distractions keeps us hibernated

through winter and beyond.

                                                  It is quiet

enough at the top of Owl’s Head to hear

your own voice pierce the stillness, crack it like

a quartz line.  The fear settles over you,

an infant in a blanket.  The wind. 

It was written long ago: The echo 

of someone’s love barely touching your skin. 

It was always going to be like this. 

Samantha Kolber

 

Chris’s Villanelle

That’s because it’s a burn from 

the cheap polyester socks that rub against skin.   

Every time I slide I get some

new scrape on top of the old one.

The healing process can’t begin.    

That’s because it’s a burn from     

being fast enough, or dumb           

enough to make the slide, again

to second. Every time I slide I get some

rush of feeling I didn’t have before.

I just quit smoking

because it’s like burning from

the inside out. I must have smoked a ton

and I never really let anyone in.

Sometimes I slide and I get some

cigarettes, just to have some

security, just in case I need a clip

to keep me from the burn, from

feeling every time I slide.

God, My Father

Aching for a reason, and
Because we don’t know any better we
Coalesce our beliefs with our cognizance.
Defiantly we look out instead of in,
Exacting our own
Fates as if we’re surgeons with no
Grief, looking for a
Harbour from our sins, our desires.
Immortality is what will abrade
Justice over time, just as humanity
Kills again and again the spark, that
Light. Salient and
Manic in our search,
Nearing psychotic episodes
Of garrulous grandiosity like
Prayer. But we still pan for heaven,
Quarrel here on earth. We still ask our questions,
Rage wars that tickle His toes. We
Still try and wend our way to Him.
Thinking like Icarus, we blindly scoop our eyes
Upward to gain entrance. The
Very morning comes
Where this is all a dream, an
X-ray image of my father’s neck confirms:
You fly too close, you do get burned.
Zeroing in on the answer, we keep from flying home.

Samantha Lori Kolber

RIP Adrienne Rich

Poems Are Never Finished

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Well none of us ever fit the whole of our soul on one page.
I look back through my journal, come across anchored, dolphins,
flips end over end. It was New Year's Day.

He didn't say he didn't love me, though he didn't say he did.
With the most ordinary garbage floating around in my brain
how could I think he'd pick me? I pick and bite my fingertips till
they bleed. Trying to be healthy, we're eating rain-

bows and writing down our thoughts. You can't put cerebellum
in a poem, he says. The dark and dreamy luxury of winter...
Luxury? Winter? What?! Frosted with winter sun,
I say, the dark and dreary dream is splintered.

Liminality, then. Identity, too.
It's small enough, this boundary to you.


Samantha Kolber

I see a big tree
it doesn't see me
I am so very small
nothing sees me at all

Poems published in Red Silk, an anthology of women's writing published by Womanspace of Rockford, IL.



Mud Season in Vermont

April, mud season, also marks the anniversary
of my son’s birth. I spread his eight years on the table
as if he could be measured or given monetary
value. Someone has to write the fable

of his life and keep it like a promissory note.
Someone has to witness the new leaf
on the maple, tote
around the vision, tinged with the belief

that symbiosis is prone to etiolate
the mother. The boy, flippant as a magazine.
Of course I chose to germinate, to create.
But who tells you motherhood is so byzantine?

These eight years my body feels the slake
of the turning of baby to boy to grown man. A solemn
memory, his body in mine, I take
with me in my cells. His life, this spring, rises like a column

from the mud: full of grit
and wet black Earth. I’m bound
to get stuck. May as well tie me to the spit
and roast me. Listen to the sound.


and:

Rant Poem Written in 7 Minutes

I tie a ribbon in a foolish way
because I’m a fool and a foolish
lover.

I have wet dreams all night about
that guy who grabbed my ass.

I have visions of writing a script but
have no clue how to write one.

I spend way too much time Googling
how to write a script and not enough
time actually writing.

I am so happy at the return of the
sun.

I have all these lines of poetry
bubbling in my head and I fear they
will fizzle out and go flat like when
you leave a bottle of soda open on
the counter.

When I get these lines and words &
pieces of poems trying to worm out
I feel as if I have a battle raging
inside me: a battle between team
poet and team responsible.

The latter often wins.

I have yet to learn how to live fully
as a full-time poet in this world.

Sometimes I think there must be a
different, secret world where poets
live.

My son is asking me where the tape
is and I want to tell him to shut up.

I only asked for seven minutes and
he’s supposed to be brushing his
teeth!

I’m still in my pajamas at 2 o’clock
in the afternoon.

A dog barks.

The sun is quietly peeking out from
behind a cloud.

There are battles going on, both
inside and out.

The dog still barks.

Things everywhere rage.

Samantha Kolber

Truro Sunset

When it drops below the water
that’s only the beginning.
Musical notes drop and drift
like layers upon layers of clouds glowing

and the foam on the crest
of the waves are even whiter
than the corners of your eyes.

Sky blue pink, but there’s more than that
more than the last licks of
the fire hat of the sky.

There were seven kings of Rome
your dad tells me.
Here we sit the four of us
watching night arrive, silent
as the common man.

Hubbard Park At Dusk

Here I sit with the melting sky,
the sun sunken behind bald mountains,
the trees: just sticks I can see through,
the screams and laughter and stomping feet of the boys behind me
and the light fading imperceptibly so

and somehow I know
that each tall pine standing in a circle around me
appreciates the sound of the children's laughter
piercing the silence
ever so shockingly often.